Literary Pretensions
Oct. 1st, 2012 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselMar 2012
House of Shadows - John Langan - Night Shade Books, 2010
* *
When I was a student, I went through a horror phase due to the influence of a friend. Of the various authors I tried, Ramsey Campbell was my favourite. His mix of supernatural horror with everyday nastiness by believable characters worked rather better for me than the gross-out horror of Clive Barker's The Damnation Game (a book I remember for all the wrong reasons) or the impressive imagination but overblown writing of H.P. Lovecraft.
I remarked recently to said friend that I hadn’t read a Ramsey Campbell novel in years, so he leant me this one as being "Campbell-like". Its subject matter - supernatural horror arising from human emotions - is indeed very Campbellian. However, it is clearly a first novel and there are numerous problems. It's like Ramsey Campbell, but not as good.
The story is told by Veronica Croydon, a young widow, to a first-person author over the course of two evenings. In it she explains how her husband Roger, an Eng. Lit. academic, came to disappear. Which turns out to be heavily related to her step-son Ted, a soldier, whom Roger disowned after he argued with him about divorcing his mother, and who then died in a rocket attack on a town square in Afghanistan. Could a curse uttered by Roger have something to do with his death, and for the subsequent eerie experiences that Roger and Veronica have in their family home?
The first problem in a book that clearly has some literary pretensions is the choice of names. Roger's surname is described by him as of English origin. In fact, Croydon is the unlovely suburb of London where I went to school, and its use as someone's name is to most British readers either hilarious (Eric Pode of Croydon!) or a constant annoying reminder of the author's cultural ignorance (I could only cope by mentally transliterating it to "Corydon"). The first names are no better. The action is set in the eastern USA, but Veronica, Roger and Ted sound like characters from an Ayckbourn play. This perhaps goes some way to explaining why the deep and irrational hatred of Roger and Ted for each other feels more like a soap opera than anything believable.
The author's cloth ear is equally apparent in that common disease of neophyte writers, literary dialogue. This is the tendency of characters to speak as if they were reading a page of text. For example:
Clearly it is intended to emphasise Roger's academic nature, but not even Oxford dons talk like this. It comes over as prose that has been badly converted into dialogue to liven it up.
The framing story is unnecessary and makes the text unconvincing. Veronica would not have quoted dialogue verbatim. There is a reason that H.P. Lovecraft and others were so fond of found journals and literary editors as framing devices.
The supernatural visitations are handled quite well and are suitably irrational. But I found the descriptions vague and as neither Roger or Veronica are particularly sympathetic, not horrific enough. Horror only really works when you care somewhat about the characters.
There are some literary and artistic glosses which are intended to add depth to the proceedings but which only annoy. The references to Dickens are just the author pointing out where he got his ideas from. The presumably fictional painters Thomas Belvedere and De Castries added nothing to the story and appear to be a big red herring.
All in all, not a book to get excited about, I'm afraid. Langan has potential, but needs a strong editor to take him in hand.
House of Shadows - John Langan - Night Shade Books, 2010
* *
When I was a student, I went through a horror phase due to the influence of a friend. Of the various authors I tried, Ramsey Campbell was my favourite. His mix of supernatural horror with everyday nastiness by believable characters worked rather better for me than the gross-out horror of Clive Barker's The Damnation Game (a book I remember for all the wrong reasons) or the impressive imagination but overblown writing of H.P. Lovecraft.
I remarked recently to said friend that I hadn’t read a Ramsey Campbell novel in years, so he leant me this one as being "Campbell-like". Its subject matter - supernatural horror arising from human emotions - is indeed very Campbellian. However, it is clearly a first novel and there are numerous problems. It's like Ramsey Campbell, but not as good.
The story is told by Veronica Croydon, a young widow, to a first-person author over the course of two evenings. In it she explains how her husband Roger, an Eng. Lit. academic, came to disappear. Which turns out to be heavily related to her step-son Ted, a soldier, whom Roger disowned after he argued with him about divorcing his mother, and who then died in a rocket attack on a town square in Afghanistan. Could a curse uttered by Roger have something to do with his death, and for the subsequent eerie experiences that Roger and Veronica have in their family home?
The first problem in a book that clearly has some literary pretensions is the choice of names. Roger's surname is described by him as of English origin. In fact, Croydon is the unlovely suburb of London where I went to school, and its use as someone's name is to most British readers either hilarious (Eric Pode of Croydon!) or a constant annoying reminder of the author's cultural ignorance (I could only cope by mentally transliterating it to "Corydon"). The first names are no better. The action is set in the eastern USA, but Veronica, Roger and Ted sound like characters from an Ayckbourn play. This perhaps goes some way to explaining why the deep and irrational hatred of Roger and Ted for each other feels more like a soap opera than anything believable.
The author's cloth ear is equally apparent in that common disease of neophyte writers, literary dialogue. This is the tendency of characters to speak as if they were reading a page of text. For example:
"I'm glad we can talk about your ex-wife so much."
"I'm merely settling myself into their viewpoints. Where I grew up, there certainly were marriages where a substantial age difference existed between spouses. The majority of those were because the man in question's first wife has died, in general leaving him with one or more children in need of a mother. Since his age also meant he had accumulated some share of material goods, he had more to offer than the difficulties of raising someone else's resentful children. There was security to be had. I have the impression that these matches were tolerated quite well." (p 206)
Clearly it is intended to emphasise Roger's academic nature, but not even Oxford dons talk like this. It comes over as prose that has been badly converted into dialogue to liven it up.
The framing story is unnecessary and makes the text unconvincing. Veronica would not have quoted dialogue verbatim. There is a reason that H.P. Lovecraft and others were so fond of found journals and literary editors as framing devices.
The supernatural visitations are handled quite well and are suitably irrational. But I found the descriptions vague and as neither Roger or Veronica are particularly sympathetic, not horrific enough. Horror only really works when you care somewhat about the characters.
There are some literary and artistic glosses which are intended to add depth to the proceedings but which only annoy. The references to Dickens are just the author pointing out where he got his ideas from. The presumably fictional painters Thomas Belvedere and De Castries added nothing to the story and appear to be a big red herring.
All in all, not a book to get excited about, I'm afraid. Langan has potential, but needs a strong editor to take him in hand.